NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
Learning Diffusion Models with Flexible Representation Guidance
- Chenyu Wang
- Cai Zhou
- Sharut Gupta
- Johnson Lin
- Stefanie Jegelka
- Stephen Bates
- Tommi Jaakkola
Diffusion models can be improved with additional guidance towards more effective representations of input. Indeed, prior empirical work has already shown that aligning internal representations of the diffusion model with those of pre-trained models improves generation quality. In this paper, we present a systematic framework for incorporating representation guidance into diffusion models. We provide alternative decompositions of denoising models along with their associated training criteria, where the decompositions determine when and how the auxiliary representations are incorporated. Guided by our theoretical insights, we introduce two new strategies for enhancing representation alignment in diffusion models. First, we pair examples with target representations either derived from themselves or arisen from different synthetic modalities, and subsequently learn a joint model over the multimodal pairs. Second, we design an optimal training curriculum that balances representation learning and data generation. Our experiments across image, protein sequence, and molecule generation tasks demonstrate superior performance as well as accelerated training. In particular, on the class-conditional ImageNet $256\times 256$ benchmark, our guidance results in $23. 3$ times faster training than the original SiT-XL as well as four times speedup over the state-of-the-art method REPA.